State investigators say child predators turning more aggressive

MURRAY, Utah — State investigators said Wednesday that predators are acting more aggressively and are commonly using multiple accounts and platforms to groom children as a report shed new light on a case where a boy was lured away from a Layton home last year.

Michelle Busch-Upwall, training coordinator with the Utah Attorney General’s Office Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said it’s no longer as simple as parents taking a phone away to protect a child.

“They’re on so many different devices,” Busch-Upwall said. “They’re on virtual reality platforms like Oculus, they’re on online gaming — which is huge.”

The predators, Busch-Upwall said, have been emboldened by the diversity of options to contact kids while evading detection through a variety of different accounts.

“There’s more aggression with predators now taking them out of their homes,” Busch-Upwall said.

A recent in-depth report by NBC News examined the challenges and failings that led to a 13-year-old boy being lured away from his Layton home in late December.

In that case, the family and law enforcement said 26-year-old Tadashi Kojima, a.k.a. Hunter Fox and formerly Aaron Michael Zeman, groomed the boy over the course of two months via Roblox, Discord and even publicly on Twitter.

According to the report, though the parents confiscated the boy’s electronics and went to Layton Police in late November after discovering concerning message chains and even requests for GPS pins to the boy’s house and bus stop, the stranger was still able to make contact through a discarded cell phone and virtual reality headset and lure the boy away after Christmas.

Ultimately, officers found the two in Nebraska. Kojima remains in Nebraska awaiting a trial in June.

Busch-Upwall, because of active investigations involving other agencies, did not address the Kojima case directly but said it was important generally for parents in these cases to watch for warning signs in their kids, including isolation and turning screens away or off so that parents can’t see them.

She said good communication with children is always key and that monitoring software may be warranted depending on the circumstance.

Busch-Upwall also urged parents to be up-to-speed on who kids are chatting with online, particularly when odd or unknown names and numbers appear.

“With all that access, (predators) just have a lot more vulnerabilities with kids and they prey on those,” Busch-Upwall said.